The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a research unit within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, brings together researchers from across MIT who mix their diverse expertise to know intelligence through tightly coupled scientific research and rigorous engineering. These researchers engage in collaborative efforts that span science, engineering, humanities, and more.
SQI goals to know how brains produce intelligence and the way this could be replicated in artificial systems to handle real-world problems that exceed the capabilities of current artificial intelligence technologies.
“At SQI, we study intelligence scientifically and customarily, within the hope that by studying neuroscience and behavior in humans and animals, and by studying what we will construct as intelligent engineering artifacts, we’ll have the ability to know the elemental principles of intelligence,” he says Leslie Pack KaelblingSQI Research Director and Panasonic Professor within the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“At SQI, we imagine that understanding human intelligence is one in every of the best open questions in science – right up there with the origin of the universe and our place in it, in addition to the origin of life. The query of human intelligence has two parts: how it really works and where it comes from. If we understand these, we’ll see results far beyond our current understanding,” he says Jim DiCarloSQI Director and Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience within the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Exploring the nice mysteries of the mind
The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence was recently renamed in recognition of a significant gift from the MIT Siegel Family Siegel Family Foundation This enables further growth SQI's research and activities.
SQI's efforts are organized around missions – long-term, collaborative projects based on fundamental questions in intelligence and supported by platforms – systems and software – that enable recent research and create benchmarking and testing interfaces.
“Our unit at MIT is the just one dedicated to constructing a scientific understanding of intelligence, collaborating with researchers across the institute,” says DiCarlo. “The last decade has seen remarkable advances in AI, but I imagine the following decade will bring even greater advances in our understanding of human intelligence – advances that may reshape what we call AI. By supporting us, David Siegel, the Siegel Family Endowment and our other donors reveal their confidence in our approach.”
A legacy of interdisciplinary support
In 2011, David Siegel SM '86, PhD '91 founded the Siegel Family Endowment (SFE) to support organizations working on the intersection of learning, workforce, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations that address society's most crucial challenges, while supporting progressive civic and community leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers and others who advance this work. Siegel is a pc scientist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. During his graduate studies at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, he worked on robotics within the group of Tomás Lozano-Pérez – currently Professor of Teaching Excellence within the School of Engineering – specializing in sensing and sensing. He later co-founded Two Sigma with the assumption that progressive technology, AI and data science could help discover the worth of the world's data. Today, Two Sigma drives change across the financial services industry in investment management, enterprise capital, private equity and real estate.
Siegel explains: “The human brain is maybe essentially the most complex physical system within the universe, yet most individuals haven’t shown much interest in how it really works. People take the mind with no consideration but wonder a lot about other scientific mysteries, similar to the origin of the universe. My fascination with the brain and its interface with artificial intelligence stems from this. I don't care if there are business applications for this search; as an alternative, we should always pursue research like that conducted on the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence to advance our research.” As we learn more about human intelligence, I hope we’ll lay the muse not just for the advancement of artificial intelligence, but additionally for the expansion of our own considering.”
As a long-time supporter of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a collaborative interdisciplinary research initiative funded by the National Science Foundation, and one in every of the primary donors to the MIT Quest for Intelligence, David Siegel helped lay the muse for the research underway today. In early 2024, he founded Open Athena, a nonprofit organization bridging the gap between academic research and cutting-edge AI. Open Athena equips universities with world-class AI and data engineering talent to speed up breakthrough discoveries at scale. Siegel is a member of the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, vice chairman of the Scratch Foundation and a member of the Cornell Tech Council. He also serves on the boards of Re:Build Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST and Carnegie Hall.
A catalyst for global collaboration
MIT President Sally Kornbluth says, “Of all of the donors and supporters whose generosity has fueled the Quest for Intelligence, none has been more necessary from the outset than David Siegel. Without his long-standing commitment to CBMM and support for the Quest, this community may never have formed. There is every reason to imagine that David's recent gift, which renames the Quest for Intelligence and in addition supports the Schwarzman College of Computing, will further shape the long run of this initiative and the sector itself.” She continues: “Powered by generous donors – particularly David Siegel’s transformative gift – SQI is poised to tackle a good more necessary role.”
SQI scientists and engineers present their work widely, publish articles, and develop recent tools and technologies which can be utilized in research institutions all over the world, while collaborating with colleagues from disciplines across the Institute and at universities and institutions all over the world. DiCarlo explains, “We are a part of the Schwarzman College of Computing, on the intersection of individuals considering biology and various types of intelligence and folks considering AI. We work with partners at other universities, nonprofits, and industry – we will't do it alone.”
“Fundamentally, we should not an AI effort. We are a human intelligence effort using the tools of technology,” says DiCarlo. “This gives us, amongst other things, very useful insights for human learning and health, but additionally very useful tools for AI – including AI that may simply work significantly better in a human world.”
The entire SQI community of college, students, and staff looks forward to taking up recent challenges in the hassle to know the foundations of intelligence.
New missions and next horizons
SQI research is expanding: the mission's principal investigators are combining their efforts in various areas of interest, increasing their impact in the sector. In the approaching months, the organization plans to launch a brand new social intelligence mission.
“We have to concentrate on problems that reflect natural and artificial intelligence – and be sure that we evaluate recent models for tasks that reflect what humans and other natural intelligence can do,” he says Nick RoySQI Director of Systems Engineering and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. He predicts that SQI's future research will depend on asking the appropriate questions: “While we’re good at choosing tasks that test our computational models, and we’re extremely good at choosing tasks which can be one way or the other consistent with what our models can already do, we want to recover at choosing tasks and benchmarks that also say something about natural intelligence,” he says.
On November 24, 2025, faculty, staff, students and supporters gathered for an event titled “The Next Horizon: The Future of Quest” to have fun SQI's next chapter. The event consisted of a day of research updates, a panel discussion, and a poster session on recent and evolving research, and was attended by David Siegel, representatives of the Siegel Family Endowment, and various members of the MIT Corporation. Recordings of the event's presentations can be found on SQI YouTube channel.
